To a editor: I was innate in Boyle Heights and lived there during a 1950s and ’60s. This was a duration of abounding diversity, a informative and secular tapestry of Russian Jews, Latinos, Japanese and even “Amerikkkanos.” Over a final few years I’ve watched Boyle Heights grow and rise into an energetic, colourful community. (“A village in flux: Will Boyle Heights be busted by one coffee shop?” Jul 18)
But I’m uneasy by a supposed anti-gentrification transformation fomenting insurgency to new institutions like a art galleries and workman coffee shops that have changed into a neighborhood. The picture of intransigent, angry, riotous Latinos feeds a disastrous classify prevalent in a nation today.
Affordable housing, business growth and artistic countenance in Boyle Heights can usually bearing it brazen and forestall it from falling into a backwater city with no soul.
Toni Burgoyne, Pasadena
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To a editor: Apparently, some protestors in Boyle Heights wish to keep their village strongly Latino, reduce center category and solidified in time.
They wish to isolate themselves opposite a advance of “minimalist aesthetics and hipster style” that, as hand-holding fundamentally leads to pregnancy, will parent gentrification and a neighborhood’s secular cleansing. A coffee emporium is as dangerous as an art gallery — and it’s not coffee or art per se, though “the effect.”
But many some-more dangerous is a sincere secular profiling member to a protests — a vituperation opposite “white art” and “white coffee” as a enemy. What’s next, propelling Latinos to equivocate Anglo businesses anywhere in a preventative bid to quarrel probable gentrification infection?
The colourful L.A. art (and coffee) scene, abounding from Bergamot Station to Los Angeles Brewery and beyond, knows no secular or informative barriers. But this criticism has finished a full American circle, from a intent of secular influence to a promulgators.
Mitch Paradise, Los Angeles
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To a editor: The Times has finished a good pursuit of chronicling a insurgency to a gentrification of East L.A. While we both know and sympathize with a protesters (at slightest a pacific ones), we fear that their efforts will eventually fail, as we can't branch a waves of progress.
This emanate is only a phenomenon of a systemic problem of both homelessness and housing affordability. Since redevelopment agencies were eliminated, a problem continues to expand with no resolution in sight.
While there is no singular answer to a problem, countless organizations are lobbying for lease control, rebate in lot distance boundary for grandma flats, laws to need developers to set aside space for affordable housing and more.
I trust we need, during a County Board of Supervisors level, a extensive devise to understanding with this problem.
Ron Garber, Duarte
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To a editor: The anti-gentrification quarrel being waged in Boyle Heights opposite a “white” coffee residence should be seen for what it is: racism.
It was nauseous when whites protested opposite African Americans relocating into Cicero, Ill., in 1951. It was nauseous when African Americans burnt businesses owned by Asians or whites in Los Angeles in 1992. It’s nauseous now when Americans of Hispanic skirmish criticism new business since their owners are white.
Fortunately, it seems many Boyle Heights residents don’t approve of these demonstrations. People who have been discriminated opposite should learn to quarrel injustice in all a nauseous forms.
Richard W. Merel, Hermosa Beach
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